Hulu Hits 1 Million Paid Subscribers - The UpStream

Hulu Hits 1 Million Paid Subscribers

Things might be looking up for Hulu, finally. CEO Jason Kilar said this week that the video streaming service has over 1 million paid subscribers on its network, meeting its numbers that the company predicted earlier in the year. With Hulu still up for sale, this certainly adds a lot of value to the company, who has been struggling in recent months to gain any traction in a market of new, rising services.

While Hulu plans on spending another $375 million on content this year, it also helped that they spent big bucks on partner agreements with Viacom and Miramax only a few short months ago.

It also should be noted that Hulu is still the only service to stream just-aired shows as soon as 24 hours after initial airing. Kilar chalks up the growth of the company to those TV shows and the exclusives that they have with the joint owners of News Corp., Disney and Comcast Universal.

Kilar did mention that, despite some programming stations not wanting to come over to the green machine, Hulu is projecting $500 million in revenue this year alone. "I'm cautiously optimistic that we'll work with everyone over time," Kilar said.

As far as the sale of Hulu, that's still up in the air. Rumors of Google, Amazon or Yahoo bidding for the company are still flying around and nobody behind the closed doors are saying anything to hint one way or the other. At this point, all we know is that 1 million paid subscribers are waiting for an answer that needs to be known soon.